Alex Renton
GLUTTONS FOR PUNISHMENT
Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal
By Tristram Stuart (Penguin Books 451pp £9.99)
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An amusing side effect of the economic gloom has been the rediscovery of thrift - a virtue that had been as neglected in the materialist age as chastity. But every time I read another article in the lifestyle sections about the uses of ham hocks and chicken necks, or the joys of composting, I think: you don't know thrift. You've no idea. I save the Christmas wrapping paper. My mother puts six uneaten peas in a clingfilm-covered ramekin. My grandmother kept a jam jar in her desk that she'd inherited from her mother. (Saving jam jars - there's an idea.) On my great-grandmother's jar, in sepia copperplate, were the words: 'Pieces of String Too Small to Be of Use'. And it was full of them.
'Waste not, want not!' How that sombre phrase must have rung through the schoolroom and scullery - and how utterly forgotten it is now. Today we British throw away 223 kg of food per person every year, a hillock of rubbish for every household. In it is 30 per cent of all the food we buy, if you believe the figures from the government's waste agency, WRAP. In the USA, 50 per cent of all food is wasted. Many civilisations are remembered by their detritus, but our memorial will be the great toxic, planet-altering mess we left - what Tristram Stuart calls 'the effluence of affluence'.
Stuart is a historian and a 'food industry analyst': like me, he has spent time nose-down in the treasure skips at the back of supermarkets, where the modern habit of chucking out perfect food for daft reasons is best illustrated (and after visiting them you can throw a dinner party with the pickings). A timely and shocking account of the waste mountain, his book should be a compulsory, shrink-wrapped addition to every new celebrity chef's glossy recipe book, because it is with food that the waste habit is most shocking and most destructive. Stuart points out that in the world's richest countries people are going hungry - 43 million in the European Union and 35 million in the States. Poverty agencies in the UK alone claim that that 'four million people cannot access a decent diet'. Yet retailers and food manufacturers throw away millions of tonnes of good food - certainly more than we throw out domestically, though the figures are hard to pin down.
This waste is not confined to the rich world - India alone throws out $14 billion worth of agricultural produce per annum. And the growing meat habit there, as everywhere, is a source of more waste: famously, it takes 10 kg of vegetable matter to produce 1 kg of meat. A plate of farmed fish, such us salmon, takes three plates of edible fish to produce. As the world savours the prospect of 9 billion people demanding food on their plates by 2050, it seems obvious that tackling food waste is a must - perhaps more worth pursuing than hi-tech notions like the genetic modification of crops.
What shall we do? Government moans about waste, but is feeble at tackling the real wastrels (as with the food and health debate, it's always been easier to blame the consumers rather than the corporations). Stuart travels to the Far East, where there are more aggressive measures being employed than the government's feeble public information effort here. In Japan, he stays with an urban family who eat small amounts of many different foods and is told by the daughter: 'At school we are taught that leaving anything uneaten after a meal shows ingratitude to farmers and that, if we do, the mottainai monster will get us'. Mottainai is untranslatable, but it is a condemnation of wastefulness. The threat doesn't work though - since their economic boom the Japanese have been as wasteful as we have, though the sin, again, seems to lie on the supply side. There, as here, it is the demand for 'fresh' and unmarked food that entails most waste: 50 per cent of fresh vegetables are thrown away by packers and retailers trying to satisfy the demand for the perfection that they have trained shoppers to expect.
But there are other countries that point to the future. In Taiwan and South Korea - both places that are running out of space for their rubbish - Stuart finds that, since 2005, food waste may not be sent to landfill. Everything must be recycled, either by anaerobic digestion to produce gas for power, or as animal feed. Of course, in Britain we cannot do the latter. Among the many daft governmental reactions to the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 was the outlawing of the feeding of food waste - swill - to animals like pigs and chickens, a practice that had gone on ever since we first domesticated the beasts 10,000 years ago. Farmers still cannot be trusted, with some reason, to feed their animals decently: but, as Stuart points out, we could permit commercial concerns to boil and process waste from homes and restaurants into feed pellets, policing them as necessary.
There is an obvious solution to the food waste problem, in Britain at least. To my surprise, in this otherwise thorough book, Tristram Stuart doesn't go there. It's the price of food. Thirty years ago we spent 20 per cent of our household incomes on food - now, for the middle class, the figure is less than 10 per cent. A lot of ills derive from the fact that food is too cheap: not only do we throw it away without qualms, but we buy and eat more than we need. Meanwhile, farmers and producers, squeezed by the four supermarkets that now control nearly 80 per cent of Britain's food retail industry, get less and less of a share of the shrinking profit cake. No wonder they cut corners. The supermarkets, whose dominant marketing strategy has always been 'value', cannot help but drive prices as low as possible. What we don't value we tend to waste: if we want to eat well during this hungry century, we must start paying more for food now.
Alex Renton writes on food policy and food culture for The Times, Prospect and The Observer.